Daily Market Update – November 3, 2016

The first was the end of that 108 year old baseball drought in Chicago.

The second was that as the S&P 500 futures were trading flat in the early trading, we had just come off of a 7 day losing streak on that index.

Surprisingly, that was the longest such losing streak in the past 5 years, as we have been in a slow, stealthy kind of decline from our highs on 2016.

For the most part, 2016 hasn’t exactly been anything to crow about, but what little we had has been eroding as each of the past 3 months have been net losers.

For my part, I’m still pleased that this isn’t 2015 and I would be happy to close the books on the year, as I type, but there is still lots and lots ahead of us.

This week still has more earnings and an Employment Situation Report tomorrow.

Next week brings more earnings and I tend to think that in the current economy the retailer earnings reports may be the most important of all.

What everyone really wants to hear from them is their outlook for the Christmas season and what they believe 2017 may bring in its first few months.

By this time next week, we should, then, have a decent idea of whether the FOMC can find it relatively easy to interpret the data that they care about to make an interest rate decision in time for their December 2016 meeting.

While most everyone has been expecting a rate increase to be announced at that time, no one is really predicting what the reaction by traders might be.

Of course, there are predictions and then there is reality, but there is also the short term immediate reaction and the longer term reaction.

The last time we were in this position the short term reaction wasn’t bad, but it didn’t last very long and the longer term reaction took us down by 10% in the space of about a month.

Circumstances shouldn’t be very different this time around, but who knows what the outcome might end up being.